I think Star Wars does “humans as a race” quite well in this sense. SW humans are not tired to a specific irl culture, they are generic and can come from literally anywhere, have whatever skin color you want, whatever features you want, whatever accent you want. Rey grew up on NOT Tattooine and was raised by a Blobfish, but she speaks like a Brit. And it works, kinda.
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Easy, apply the “Horde treatment” on the race and make the Worgen Blown Up Highmountain for the lols while they “huehuehue” while at it.
There, you have Worgen depicted as scum with ZERO chance to justify their actions… are you willing to get this “nice” development toether with the inevitable Horde chastising done by Anduin and Baine AND with the removal of Genn after he gets depicted as idk… a psychopatyh with NO apparent replacement?
Cause I´m quite sure this would NOT be what you would sign for.
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I think that you have to go back to this well so often when Alliance players tell you that they would like to have your experience should tell you something. Maybe we’re not appreciating the true color of the grass on your side of the hill, but it should tell you that there’s a disconnect.
I’d love to blow up Highmountain and get away with it tbh
Sure but for WoW this has never been the case.
WoW Humans are explicitly US/Western Europe at various points in history.
Eg Kul Tiras, being 17th century US Colonial Period + UK Regency Period + 19th Century Lovecraftian US + 19th century UK Victorian
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I think that this was a weird choice to be honest. I had always imagined Kul Tiras being Hispanic or in some way Iberian. Talking about cultural diversity in WoW and you don’t even need to leave Europe to get more diversity in human cultures than we have.
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I’m probably out of my element asking this, but given that a staple of fantasy is fantastical species, is it actually an inherent problem that non-human beings get depicted with differing cultural analogues in a story? Shouldn’t it be fine as long as those depictions aren’t negative on a cultural or racial level?
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Too late now.
And again, WoW has always explored IRL cultural diversity by making all the nonwestern cultures the monster races.
This has always been the case.
For twenty years.
Ship has sailed for otherwise. Thus Blizzard has an obligation to do justice by their world building choices.
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Nope isn’t a problem because it actually brings light to the IRL problem that NonWhite peoples were considered monsters and our humanity debated for most of Modern period history.
The problem comes when you reproduce racist tropes within that construction
Eg Baine the Noble Savage
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In theory it would be, but in practice is is more challenging than that, especially if you want to tell a satisfying and in any way realistic war story while maintaining an effective protagonist/antagonist structure.
It can absolutely be done, but it’s hard and requires considerable time to establish appropriate depth and complexity. And even then you’ll never make anyone happy.
Add to that that WoW isn’t a novel or a long running TV series but a video game with an intentionally utilitarian plot and it becomes even dicier.
Nah that’s a cop out.
If they had made Baine with his magical Tauren connection to the Earthmother the Magni equivalent for the Horde, that would be respectfully applying the logics of his IRL cultural basis in a constructive way within the game while world building the Tauren and developing his character
They didn’t.
They were and have been lazy for the Horde races, for YEARS, for increasingly palpable and undeniable reasons. Either fear and insecurity, or malice.
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Would this be meaningful representation with depth or would it be tokenism in lieu of it? I imagine that many indigneous people might be annoyed at their culture being reduced to a “they are one with the land” stereotype.
Blizzard already explores human diversity to be explored by way of using literal aliens or non-human monster races as the stand ins for non-Western cultures. It already explores non-Western heritages by way of characters that are explicitly completely different species. one could easily interpret the Horde as an implicit statement of “these particular human cultures are so different that they might as well not be humans”, which is indeed extremely yikes.
Ideally, it wouldn’t have been like this. Ideally, Blizzard would’ve explored these cultures via the setting’s humans. Ideally, the situation in which green tusked orcs are the “generic Hollywood fantasy European kingdoms” while the setting’s humans draw largely from “Central Asian pastoral steppe people living under clans lead by a Khan” as equally viable.
But that’s not the situation it’s in. And it’s important to recognize and critically examine why it’s not the position it’s in.
Given the situation Blizzard wrote themselves into, what they CAN do is actually take all these aliens and non-humans and non-Western stand-ins they have and actually treat them less like things that exist to facilitate the human’s story and stand in contrast to them. What they can do, given this situation, is treat the Horde races with the same dignity and attention to detail and breadth/depth of complexity they allow to Stormwind without also having to make things about Stormwind and focusing on Stormwind’s point of view. When it does utilize references to different cultures, it can treat those references with more care and make use of fewer stereotypes and dehumanizing tropes. They can stand to treat in universe like actual humans as well, which would entail giving them meaningful flaws and vices and not just saving those for others. Not better/worse. Just different. It can do better than most of it’s peers in the gaming sphere.
Because Blizzard *has* done it before!
The Warcraft franchise has been better at doing than a lot of other popular fantasy settings. It pretty much popularized the concept of playable Orcs/Goblins/Trolls/etc a fairly acceptable thing. It gave them more nuance, characterization, pathos, and depth than most fantasy settings ever have. If anything, it’s been a head of the curve in many instances.
But As of Cataclysm, Blizzard has seriously been slipping back into pretty standard Horde races=bad, Alliance races (especially humans)= good narrative. Where once the game was sold on largely distinct Orc/Human/Horde/Alliance campaigns, things have become increasingly about bringing the “good” Orcs/Horde into the same story as the in setting humans, where they show how much like the in-setting humans they are. All the while, the in-setting humans are looking less and less like ACTUAL IRL humans, and more like super idealized versions of rehashed fantasy tropes masquerading as everymen.
But then it does stuff like Zandalar, which was very much a surprise to me, especially with how they ended up handling Bwonsamdi by actually giving him personality reminiscent of the real world Lwa that inspired him and giving him humanizing bits not making him just an Africanized Grim Reaper that steals your soul -like so many other genre works would have.
We’re here talking about how to fix the Horde because Blizzrd was once on a pretty good path with them. Better than most of its contemporaries in gaming at least. Treating the Horde- not as monsters or vehicles to teach the human characters moral lessons- but as characters in and of themselves with their own seperate story worth telling, is what distinguished the franchise and put it on the map.
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Honestly, the least they could do is explore some not Anglo-Saxon cultures of Europe.
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Facts this is literally the only MMO and one of the only video games that features any of my IRL culture as a major part of the world building
The ingredients and tools are all there but Blizzard insists on giving me McDonald’s while giving a 3 course meal to the Humans lol
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I’ve always been fascinated with Capital City’s unique architecture. It reminds me of Byzantine architecture and since it’s supposed to harken back to the days of Arathor I wonder if the Arathorian Empire was similarly Greco-Roman in style.
They do.
Draenei are Russian.
Nightborne are French.
Night Fae are Irish.
Venthyr are Romanian
Hell some of the AU Orcs had German accents for whatever reason.
That’s the point lol it’s intentional
How did y’all not clock this in 20 years
I’ll give you Night Fae, but the rest? Hardly. Having a vague Slavic-esque accent and a few French names is barely “irl culture influence”.
Agreed, but I think it merits noting that this wasn’t an approach that they initiated in Warcraft 3. Warcraft 1 and 2 were similarly unusual in that they allowed you to play as the monster faction and attack the traditional fantasy humans complete with your own motivations for doing so.
It was campy but it was there. And it was also in a role where the Horde was indisputably the villains. But they were villain protagonists.
I bring this up because often it seems that the core of complaints about the Horde’s portrayal relative to the Alliance is that the Horde was overtly villainous, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be since Blizzard also has a strong history in creating compelling villain protagonists. So essentially, it’s important to be clear in what’s being advocated here: Is the problem that the Horde is villainous relative to the Alliance, or is the problem that their villainy lacks believable depth? Or is the problem that there are villains at all?
Barely yes but that’s the basis for it.
Nightborne has a Lily revolutionary symbol (fleur de lis and cockade fused together) too, it’s not just accents and names.
You aren’t getting French Humans or Balkan Humans in-game because that’s the intentional design of the world.
What’s not clicking? You’ve said it yourself, WoW Humans are US and Euro Anglos
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